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Oscillating from a Distance: a Study of Metamodernism in Theory and Practice

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Oscillating from a Distance: a Study of Metamodernism in Theory and Practice Undergraduate Journal of Humanistic Studies • Spring 2015 • Vol. I Oscillating from a Distance: A Study of Metamodernism In Theory and Practice Noah Bunnell Carleton College May 24, 2015 n or about December 1910, human character changed.” Or so said Virginia Woolf, tongue-in- “Ocheek, about the rise of modernism. It goes without saying that literary movements are not like presidential terms; they have no inauguration date. But in the last century (though certainly long before then), literary critics and authors have described the dominant cultural sensibility with terms like “modernism” and “postmodernism.” These terms are only heuristic labels; the temporal boundaries they attempt to establish are inevitably nebulous. Modernist writers did not stop writing after postmodernism became the dominant literary mode in the late 1960s. Rather, as Brian McHale describes, the transition from modernist to postmodernist fiction is marked by a “change of dominant” (11) — specifically, a shift from foregrounding epistemological questions to foregrounding ontological ones. The term “postmodernism” has long since percolated into public consciousness, and academics in the past few decades have begun to question whether postmodernism is still the dominant literary aesthetic, asking when and if and what will eventually take its place. As early as the 1990s, writers and literary critics were contemplating the death of postmodernism and anticipating the rise of its elusive successor. Postmodern writer John Barth was asked in a 1994 interview, “What’s the future? Where do we go from here? Is there a post-postmodernism?” His answer: “I attended a seminar in Germany two summers ago on the end of postmodernism, new beginnings, just when I thought I was beginning to get the hang of what the term postmodernism means” (Barth 1994). Writers and critics were not the only ones anticipating the end of a postmodern era. In 1997, the University of Chicago hosted a philosophy conference called After Postmodernism. In 2011, The Institute of Classical Art and Architecture held a conference in New York called Reconsidering Postmodernism. That same year, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibition, Postmodernism – Style and Subver- sion 1970–1990, depicted postmodernism as a historical movement that had come to its end. In the past decade, many works announcing the end of postmodernism have been published: “The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond” (2006), The Mourning After: Attending the Wake of Postmodernism (2007), Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism (2008), Jonathan Franzen at the End of Post- modernism (2011), and Succeeding Postmodernism: Language and Humanism in Contemporary American Literature (2013). While these theorists identify different factors that led to the decline of postmodernism, many critics agree that postmodernism has now been replaced by something else. In this paper, I will engage with the critical debate surrounding the post-postmodern moment in American fiction, exploring “metamodernism,” one of postmodernism’s proposed successors, in theory and in practice. Though a vocal cadre of staunch modernists have refused to acknowledge the cultural predom- inance of postmodern thought, and though some continue to view postmodernism as modernism’s degenerate follower and a dead end in literature, the vast majority of critics agree that postmod- ernism became the literary costume de rigueur in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. David Foster Wallace, one of the first writers to articulate both postmodernism’s successes and shortcomings, argues in his 1993 essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” that the avant-garde movement which became known as postmodernism was enormously effective at exposing corruption and disrupting our delusions about reality: [B]y offering young, overeducated fiction writers a comprehensive view of how hypocrit- ically the U.S.A. saw itself circa 1960, early television helped legitimize absurdism and 1 Undergraduate Journal of Humanistic Studies • Spring 2015 • Vol. I irony as not just literary devices but sensible responses to an unrealistic world. For irony — exploiting gaps between what’s said and what’s meant, between how things try to appear and how they really are — is the time-honored way artists seek to illuminate and explode hypocrisy. (182) Wallace explains that when postmodernism became the dominant movement in American literature, its existence as a form that challenged the establishment eventually became the establishment: “irony, irreverence, and rebellion [have] come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today’s avant-garde tries to write about” (183). Grappling with the oppressive cynicism that had come to characterize fiction and the fact that nothing had come along to take its place, Wallace writes: [I]rony is still around, bigger than ever after thirty long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It’s not a rhetorical mode that wears well. As Hyde puts it, “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.” This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. (183) As Wallace suggests, readers of postmodern works grew accustomed to the genre’s self-conscious irony and metafiction, and began to sense that postmodernism lacked solutions for the questions it was posing. Ultimately, Wallace argues, postmodernism’s inability to provide any answers en- gendered a sea of accusations that postmodernism was pessimistic, a dead end, and morally and intellectually bankrupt. Philosopher Daniel Dennett, for instance, objected to postmodernism on the grounds that its ontological uncertainty stands in direct contrast to the idea that things can be known: Postmodernism, the school of “thought” that proclaimed “There are no truths, only interpretations” has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a gen- eration of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for “conversations” in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster. (Edge) Unlike some of postmodernism’s detractors, Wallace forecasts a solution in “E Unibus Pluram,” predicting a new generation of literary rebels willing to eschew irony, self-consciousness, narcissism and solipsism. Wallace envisions that these rebels — or anti–rebels — will determine the future of fiction, write in the service of sincerity, “endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles” (192), and speak to “plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction” (193). Wallace’s predictions proved startlingly prescient. Over the past few decades, the labels “New Sincerity” and “post–irony” have become part of the cultural conversation. Furthermore, the critical debate about how to characterize and what to call this post-postmodernist movement has begun. In 2002, Linda Hutcheon asserted in The Politics of Postmodernity that the postmodern moment had “passed, even if its discursive strategies and its ideological critique continue to live on” (Vermeulen and Akker 2), and called for a new label to replace the humorously inadequate and semantically meaningless “post-postmodernism.” “I used to have a formula for my undergraduates,” said John Barth in 1994, “that Enlightenment plus industrialism generates Romanticism, and that Romanticism plus catastrophe or revolution generates modernism and that modernism plus the threat of apocalypse may generate postmod- ernism” (Barth 1994). What does postmodernism plus the problems of postmodernity generate? Many critics after Linda Hutcheon sought to give this new cultural paradigm a name to describe 2 Undergraduate Journal of Humanistic Studies • Spring 2015 • Vol. I what has been added to postmodernism and the new aesthetic it has generated. Proposals have included “Transmodernism,” “Avantpop,” “Performatism,” “New Sincerity,” “Altermodernism,” “Hy- permodernism,” “Digimodernism,” “Pseudomodernism,” and “Automodernism.” However innovative and creative these proposed successors might be, none of them adequately describe deviations from the postmodern condition, and none have been able to gain traction in the academic community, let alone become part of mainstream usage. Whatever movement will take postmodernism’s place must incorporate old and new, modernism and postmodernism, irony and sincerity. The term “metamodernism” appeared as early as the 1970’s, used by critics in philosophy, politi- cal theory, and social theory, but metamodernism as a cultural paradigm did not receive substantial attention until Dutch cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker discussed it in detail in their 2010 article in the Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, “Notes on Metamod- ernism.” Vermeulen and Akker argue that climate change, the financial crisis, political instability, and the digital revolution have conspired to catalyze the decline of postmodernism and instigate the ascension of “an emerging structure of feeling” (2), what they call metamodernism. More than just a proclamation that the era of postmodernism as dominant has ended, metamodernism is a sensibility situated between “a modern desire for sens [meaning] and a postmodern
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